First Nations designers, models, artists and artisans from across Australia gathered on Larrakia Country in Darwin this week for the Country to Couture runway show and the National Indigenous Fashion awards. In between, Guardian Australia photographed several of the featured models and designers

• Delvene Cockatoo-Collins wins National Indigenous Fashion award for textiles harvested on Country

• First Nations fashion celebrates weaving, wattle and waterways at Country to Couture 2026 – in pictures

Models CJ Rankin, a Kiyak woman, and Nelson Baker Bardi, a Nyikina man, wear Nagula Jarndu Designs.

The art centre Nagula Jarndu (Saltwater Woman) began in Rubibi/Broome in 1987 as a place for Yawuru women to gather, preserve language, share knowledge and keep culture strong. Their hand-carved woodblock prints on cotton and silks, shown at Country to Couture, share stories of saltwater, plants, family and Country.

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Police arrested Herbert Wayne Smith, 65, in connection with the Gann fire, which has burned more than 15 sq miles in Calaveras county

At least one person has died in a wildfire burning in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range that officials believed was sparked by a man using a chainsaw.

Police arrested Herbert Wayne Smith, 65, in connection with the Gann fire, which has destroyed seven buildings, scorched more than 15 sq miles in Calaveras county and killed a well-known dog breeder in the town of Angels Camp.

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People voice frustration with officials’ failure to engage with community over placement of asylum seekers in area

A smashed window pane and some broken eggshells on a footpath were some of the tell-tale signs of events that took place this week on a residential street at the edge of Thetford.

On Friday afternoon it was not hard to find local people with a sense of foreboding after the latest disorder in the Norfolk market town which has seen crowds attempt to break into properties believed to be housing asylum seekers.

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⚽ League Cup updates, 8pm BST kick-off at the Riverside
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Nathan Broadhead gets us under way. Wrexham are in all black, with Boro in all red. It’s not exactly full at the Riverside, but it’s a decent effort.

We’re 10 minutes from kick-off at the Riverside. There will be no hydration breaks and, as far as I’m aware, no full squad walkouts. Phew.

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It has been a remarkable few days for an institution that may be irredeemable but this is a story that stretches back to a decision in 2010

There are decades in which nothing happens, and weeks in which decades happen, and those weeks tend to result in leaders being toppled. Not even a fortnight ago, Gianni Infantino was taking his victory lap on Instagram, attacking “those behind their pens and papers, behind their screens spreading hate and false rumours” who had dared to question elements of his World Cup, which had generated a record $15bn in revenues. But the next day came the revelation of his plan to sell the World Cup to outside investors and a backlash that has him scrabbling to save his presidency.

It has been a remarkable few days, but this is a story whose roots stretch way back, to the decision in Zurich in 2010 to award the 2022 World Cup not to the US but to Qatar, to a furious Bill Clinton hurling an ashtray across the room and demanding action, to an FBI inquiry into corruption, and to the flipping of the larger-than-life Concacaf general secretary Chuck Blazer, who had two apartments in Trump Tower, one for himself and one for his cats.

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Vinícius Júnior and Yan Diomande are among more than 100 players at an agency owned by the hip-hop legend

In the end there was a clear winner. And Jay-Z’s latest victory came only 24 hours after the first record featuring him actually rapping for four years had been released by his wife, Beyoncé, on an extended remix pack of Morning Dew (Donk).

These days, the man who remains one of the most influential artists in hip-hop has his fingers in many pies, from the streaming service Tidal and his own streetwear brand, to champagne and cognac. But it is Roc Nation Sports – an offshoot of his entertainment company of the same name founded in 2008 – making headlines in the summer transfer window.

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It is not as well placed to take advantage of the technology as many people think.

Excelsior trapte vrijdagavond in Leeuwarden het nieuwe voetbalseizoen af tegen Cambuur en deed dat direct met een fantastisch resultaat. De ploeg uit Kralingen wist met 4-0 te winnen in het Kooi Stadion. De doelpunten werden gemaakt door Irakli Yegoian, David Garden. Noah Naujoks wist tweemaal tot scoren te komen.

Een nieuw seizoen betekent vaak nieuwe kansen en dat geldt zeker voor Shaqueel van Persie. De 19-jarige aanvaller van Feyenoord was één van de uitblinkers in de voorbereiding en heeft zich daarmee in de kijker gespeeld om de nieuwe eerste spits of rechtsbuiten, te worden. "Hij is een potentiële topspeler."

Bij een recyclingbedrijf aan de Doklaan in Rotterdam-Charlois is vrijdagavond een grote brand uitgebroken. Daarbij komt een enorme zwarte rookwolk vrij die in de wijde omtrek te zien is. Er staat een berg afval in brand. De brandweer is druk bezig met blussen. Het is nog niet duidelijk of het naastgelegen attractiepark Spelen bij Beelen gevaar loopt.

Het was rond 23:00 uur toen het in een seniorenflat aan de Rotterdamse Watertorenweg vreselijk misging. Er brak brand uit en één bewoner van de flat kwam daarbij om het leven. Een dag later zijn veel bewoners nog flink in shock: “We kennen hem allemaal goed.”

With at least 12 US states’ water systems having been hacked - most likely by Iran - we have to get better at cyber defense, according to retired General and Ex-NSA chief Paul Nakasone, who was speaking to reporters at DEF CON. “We have to have higher standards,” Nakasone said. “These PLCs should not be connected to the internet.” In late July, the FBI said it was investigating attacks conducted by “malicious cyber actors” targeting operational technology devices, including programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Iran-linked crews have targeted these devices, which monitor sensor data like tank levels, and can turn pumps on and off, for years. Some private-sector security researchers say that they suspect Iranian intruders are behind the recent cyberattacks disrupting water and wastewater facilities. “I'd be shocked if it's not Iran,” Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser told The Register at DEF CON on Friday. “It's almost certain it's Iran.” Neither the FBI nor anyone in the Trump administration, however, has officially blamed Iran. Nakasone said he believes that the feds are “taking a measured approach” to attribution. “But I see an actor here that has certainly shown a history of being able to do this,” he added, referring to earlier Iranian cyberattacks targeting water facilities’ PLCs. “They certainly have the capability,” Nakasone said. “There's an intent … we're in conflict with Iran.” US water systems present a massive attack surface across disparate facilities that are historically underfunded and have limited IT staff, and sometimes no dedicated cybersecurity employees. “We have to think differently about how we defend it,” Nakasone said. “Let's talk about the attack surface that we're looking at right now. We’ve got 50,000 different water municipalities in the United States, 90 percent of our water comes from these 50,000.” Defending these water systems requires partnerships, he added, pointing to DEF CON Franklin, a project launched two years ago at the annual event with hackers volunteering their time and talent to help secure water facilities. Nakasone also serves as founding director of Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security, and its Wicked Problems Lab. He's also working on Project Chimera, a cybersecurity platform being developed by academics and cybersecurity practitioners, and built on open-source technologies to boost critical infrastructure resilience. “How do you defend better? You defend with a series of partners, in a much more involved approach than we have right now,” Nakasone said.®

The AI giants have joined forces to ask the world’s developers to all please write their agentic skills and tools into the same format. In return, coders will be able to move these superpowers easily from one platform to another (such as when they get laid off). It's designed to be write once, run everywhere. Vercel posted the initial draft of the Agent Plugins spec on Thursday, with input from Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, and OpenAI, which all pledged fidelity (and engineers) to the project. It was quickly embraced by the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), though it will operate as an independent entity. Agent Plugins 1.0 packages an AI agent’s skills and tools in a single directory structure. It builds on the AAIF-stewarded MCP protocol and the open Agent Skills standard originally created by Anthropic in 2025. Agent Skills holds the instructions for how the agent should perform a specific task. MCP provides the connectivity to outside databases, APIs, shell scripts, and other external resources. Together, the trio makes AI capabilities modular so that they are, in theory, write-once-run-anywhere. It is still up to the agent clients, or platforms, to provide a user interface, establish security boundaries and create marketplaces where the plugins can be shared. Thus far, VS Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Codex, and Kiro all support the standard. File-system-as-configuration Agent Plugins follows the Next.js practice of using the host computer’s directory format as the structure for defining components. The spec prescribes creating a top-level directory for each plug-in, with a small manifest and schema. The manifest provides the name, version and schema of the plugin in JSON format. Skills are filed in the skills sub-directory, and the MCP server configuration is stored as an mcp.json file. Those are the essential elements, though the plugin authors can also use the namespace directory to store additional extensions. This format “keeps the shared format predictable without requiring it to absorb every client-specific experiment happening across agent products,” noted the AAIF in a blog post. Bundling the skills with the MCP configuration makes the package portable, allowing it to be copied and used across any supporting agent client. The narrow way Agent developers around the globe are adding all manner of experimental hooks, rules and extensions into their skills. Nonetheless, the keepers of the spec deliberately kept the scope “narrow” for this 1.0 release, in AAIF’s words. The best ones may be considered for future versions of the spec, though the team is not making any promises. Until then, developers can add all these extensions to the namespace and hope for the best, portability-wise. Going forward, Agent Plugins will be managed under an open governance model, with an independent technical oversight committee calling the shots, considering input from the public. Currently, engineers from Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel are on the core development team. The spec is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-4.0). There are other efforts underway to tame the wild frontier of agent development. Google folded its own Agent2Agent (A2A) agentic communications protocol effort into AAIF. Google is also building out a specification for finding tools on the web, called Agentic Resource Discovery. AAIF has a similar “complementary” project to Agent Plugins, Skills Over MCP, which shares skills by bundling them into the MCP server itself. Essentially, this approach is akin to shipping “the manual with the product,” wrote AAIF Vice President Angie Jones. Should MCPs be festooned with skills? Or should each set of skills come with an attached MCP? Let the best approach win! ®

MADRID (ANP/AFP) - Spanje stelt grenscontroles in voor reizigers vanuit Italië, laat de Spaanse regering weten. Dit als vergelding voor de grenscontroles die Italië eerder instelde voor reizigers uit Spanje nadat tienduizenden migranten vorige week de Spaanse exclave Ceuta wisten te bereiken. De grenscontroles gaan zaterdag in en blijven tot 7 september van kracht, meldt het Spaanse ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken in een verklaring.

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Dit is misschien niet waar het internet ooit voor bedoeld was, maar jongens wat zijn we blij dat het zover is gekomen. Tim Hofman heeft een interviewpodcast en dit gesprek duurt bijna twee uur, maar het had van ons ook drie dagen mogen duren, een heel semester, of misschien zelfs een volledig mensenleven. Hofman serveert schijnbaar argeloos inzichten op als 'het marxistische verhaal slaat niet aan omdat het een marxistisch verhaal is', en dat is precies de helicopter-view die bij zo'n onderwerp nodig is. Het leuke is dat hij in de pakweg tien minuten hierboven dusdanig opstijgt dat er een communist voor nodig is om hem terug naar aarde te krijgen, en dat doet die Bob Scholte eerlijk gezegd alleraardigst. Zie: "Al die miljoenen die Omroep Zwart heeft opgehaald - wat doen ze daar nou mee? Wat heeft het ons opgeleverd?"

Known for her lush assemblages of flameworked glass, Amber Cowan reimagines a ubiquitous yet fragile medium. Flowers, filigree, and colorful baubles cluster into dense compositions that invoke fairytale narratives and whimsical nature scenes. Cowan typically works with industrial scraps, antiques, and other offcasts, which allows her to draw on products and colorways that are no longer in production.

Currently leaning into cloche and coupe sculptures alongside her wall-based works, the Philadelphia-based artist is preparing for several upcoming exhibitions, including at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design in September and Design Miami in December. Her work is on view now in The Passion of Collecting at The Baker Museum in Naples, Florida, and you can find more on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Under Glass Cloches, Amber Cowan Nests Enchanting Flameworked Scenes appeared first on Colossal.

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Je hebt muzikanten die er geen probleem mee hebben om een gitaarsolo van vijf minuten te spelen, en je hebt er die vinden dat nummers daardoor een beetje lang worden. Jon Spencer (niet te verwarren met John Spencer) is zo iemand die het liever kort en krachtig houdt. Hier ragt hij er met zijn Blues Explosion in amper vier minuten twee nummers doorheen. Aangekondigd door mijn andere favoriete Jon, achternaam Stewart (of eigenlijk Leibowitz). Bij MTV!